It was not always this way. For decades, Germans took summer heat in stride. Offices had no cooling.
Homes had none. The country’s famously efficient building codes — thick walls, heavy insulation, rolladen shutters — were designed to keep cold out, not heat in.
They worked fine for a climate that rarely pushed past 30 degrees Celsius. That climate is gone. Wednesday marked the third consecutive day of record-breaking high temperatures in Germany, according to radio station Deutschlandfunk.
The heat is damaging asphalt and concrete on the Autobahn. Wildfires are burning in Saxony-Anhalt, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Bavaria.
And the state-owned broadcaster Westdeutsche Rundfunk is running a campaign telling people not to turn on their air conditioners. The broadcaster’s science platform Quark put it bluntly: “What Cools us Down Heats the Planet.” The claim — that AC use could warm the Earth by 0.05 degrees by 2050 — is the centerpiece of the campaign. The timing is awkward.
That is the polite way to put it. This did not come from nowhere. German leftists and Green politicians have campaigned against air conditioning for years.
It is a core piece of their climate platform. The logic is simple: AC units consume massive amounts of electricity, much of it still generated by coal and gas in Germany.
They also leak refrigerants, potent greenhouse gases. So the argument holds that banning or discouraging AC is a necessary sacrifice for the planet. But the political math has shifted.
Hard. The right-wing Alternative for Germany — AfD — is polling near 30 percent.
That is a record. The party has staked out a common-sense position on air conditioning. “We must not leave air conditioning,” the party has argued.
It is a simple line, and in a heatwave, it lands hard. The upcoming East German state elections will test whether that line translates into votes. Early indicators suggest it will.
German commentators reportedly fear that the anti-AC campaign will backfire badly. Telling people they cannot cool their homes during a record heatwave is not a vote-winner.
This is not a subtle observation. It is the kind of thing that seems obvious in hindsight but was apparently lost on the campaign’s planners. The campaign itself is being rolled out by Westdeutsche Rundfunk, a state-funded broadcaster.
The report of the campaign comes from Germany’s Apollo News. The broadcaster’s science platform Quark is the vehicle.
The message is clear. The reception, in homes without cooling, is likely to be cold. There is a deeper irony here.
German building standards, long praised for their energy efficiency, are part of the problem. Thick walls that keep heat in during winter also keep heat in during summer. Rolladen shutters help, but not enough when temperatures hit new records three days running.
The infrastructure is cracking. Wildfires are spreading.
And the official advice, from a state broadcaster, is to sweat it out. Follow the votes. That is what German political operatives are doing.
The AfD is not a party known for climate concern. Its rise in the polls is driven by immigration and economic anxiety.
But air conditioning is becoming a wedge issue. The Greens and their media allies have handed the AfD a gift. You do not need to be a climate scientist to see that telling people to suffer in a heatwave is bad politics.
You just need a thermometer.
